Pre-roll VAST/VPAID ads with HLS

Hi, is it possible to use HLS/Adaptive Streaming from Amazon Cloudfront along with VAST player? If not, what is the solution that you would recommend? We need pre-roll VAST/VPAID ads on our player which shall also be able to play HLS videos (m3u8 format).

FV Player Pro will easily handle HLS with Amazon CloudFront distribution, you can also set up encryption for advanced download protection of your videos. FV Player VAST is our plugin for serving VAST/VPAID ads – it’s simple to use and works perfectly with our Pro player.

If you decide for our FV Player Pro, I can also offer you an additional service of setting up the CloudFront distribution with HLS on your website for a small fee, since I know from experience that it’s a difficult process.

Hi, thanks for your response. I tried & tested the Free wordpress version of your plugin. Every time I tried to play a HLS stream, it show Flash: Video file not found, however, the admin video status showed “Ok”.

Please elaborate, will this problem be fixed on buying the Pro license? Also please understand that we want the videos to be played back on all devices, including smartphones & PCs, so can we put mid-rolls & post-roll ads once we purchase the VAST addon?

It’s because of the nature of the HLS technology. It has been developed by Apple to work primarily on their devices, such as iPhones, iPads and Macs. To watch it in browsers like Firefox, you need to have Flash installed.

Most modern browsers have it pre-installed, so it shouldn’t be a problem with your audience. FV Player also allows you to add an mp4 file, if you want to be absolutely sure. HLS always switches quality automatically. The various resolutions can be set in AWS, when preparing the stream and are included in the m3u8 afterwards.

Here is a test site with only the free FV Player version. If you have Flash installed, the HLS should work fine, but it’s without the encryption, so the video could be downloaded.

As for the question about VAST: yes, you will be able to serve it on all devices, but at this moment, FV Player VAST plugin only supports pre-roll and mid-roll with customizable start time.

Ok. So as a matter of fact, in India, most people use Windows PCs and Android phones and what I get out of your response is, HLS is mostly for Apple users. In that case, could there be a solution for the user to switch quality manually, like it happens in Youtube, considering that we are not using HLS, but MP4, WEBM & OGV links from Amazon AWS. Please help.

True, HLS is mostly for Apple devices, but it’s supported on Android since version Honeycomb (3.0). As I said, there also shouldn’t be much problems on PCs, since the Flash fallback.

If you however don’t want to use HLS, then you can easily serve videos from Amazon S3 and set the quality switching manually in FV Player settings. Take a look on the example video in this guide – Setting Up Video Quality Switching.

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